Competing for Local Queries With No Physical&nbspPremises

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

When we think of local SEO, we think of local packs, Google My Business listings, and local citations. While these things certainly are local SEO, they aren’t the whole picture. Local SEO can be split into three categories:

Local pack results for organizations with local premises

Organic results for organizations with local premises

Organic results for organizations without local premises

It’s the third category that I want to cover here today. This often-neglected and little-discussed area plays host to some of the biggest and most lucrative spaces in organic search. Think about searches like:

Chemical engineering jobs in London

Flats to rent in London

Used Ford Focus for sale in London

These terms are local in nature, and local businesses might compete for them — whether they be recruitment agencies, letting agents, or car dealerships. However, businesses without any local premises might also compete for them — whether they be online-only job boards, property listings sites, or eBay and Craigslist.

Let’s take recruiters as an example. A search for “recruiters near me” from Distilled HQ in London produces this result:

There’s a local pack, but the top result is for a listings site that does not itself have any local premises.

If we search for something more specific:

Firstly, this is a “near me” search with no local pack. The second very noticeable thing is that after the four PPC ads, Totaljobs.com are ranking both first and second(!!!). Neither they nor Indeed.co.uk have any physical premises, and the second result ranking isn’t even location-specific. In case you’re curious, Indeed gets the double-rank if I swap out “near me” for “in London”:

The points I want to make are that:

It’s totally legitimate for Indeed and Totaljobs to try to rank for these queries

This is local SEO, but there are no local packs, and these are not local sites

There are a whole range of niche concerns around this sort of situation, which I’ll cover in turn:

Whether this applies to you: Should you be competing for local queries at all?

Granularity: Which local queries should you be competing for?

Optimizing pages to compete in these spaces.

A quick side note: It is possible to generate Google My Business listings for locations where you can get someone to sort your verification, but you yourself have no real premises. This is either spam or misleading marketing depending on how you look at it. Like many other spam techniques, some sites are having success with it, but it’s not something I would endorse or recommend, and I won’t be covering it any further here.

Should you be competing for local queries at all?

The example search queries I used above all had something in common — they were different offerings based on the location a user was interested in, so having location pages made absolute sense for the users, for the sites, and for Google.

This isn’t always true. Take this example from Serenata Flowers:

Award-winning florist in West Wellow.

For context, there are no florists in or even particularly near West Wellow, which is a tiny place on the edge of the New Forest National Park in Southern England:

Furthermore, the offerings on this page are identical to those that Serenata appears to offer on every other location page. This page exists purely for SEO benefit — it’s to target local search volume, with no benefit to users other than their ability to find it through that search volume. There’s nothing you can do on this page that you can’t do from any other non-location-specific page on the site.

This isn’t unusual in this vertical, or in several others. In fact, this is one of the last big areas where doing something just for the SEO benefit not only makes sense, but seems sustainable and fairly white-hat.

One might tenuously argue that users want reassurance that their flowers will be cut close to their intended delivery destination, or that Serenata offers delivery in this area. However, in this case it would make far more sense for Serenata to have landing pages for the locations where the flowers are cut, or for logical delivery areas rather than individual villages; nobody would think that a florist in nearby Romsey offering delivery would for some reason refuse to deliver to West Wellow.

The best litmus test for whether you should be pursuing this type of landing page strategy is whether you can actually think of a useful way to differentiate these pages for users (as opposed to for Google). A flower delivery site probably can — by showing local stock and delivery times and distances — but small villages are too fine a granularity for this.

I imagine Serenata drive considerable revenue through some of their location pages for higher volume locations — despite not differentiating these pages in this way — but it’s the fact that users would look for a locally differentiated page in the first place that makes this strategy viable.

Granularity: Which local queries should you be competing for?

When deciding how to target your location pages, there will be a wide range of options, for example:

State

County

City

Town

Zip/Postal Code

Street

All of the above

Which of these options makes sense for you comes down to two main factors:

At what level of granularity are your potential customers searching?

What level of indexation can your site support?

The first question initially looks like a simple keyword research problem, but it’s harder than that. We’re getting into the seriously long-tail with some of these groupings, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t volume. Search volume tools like Google Keyword Planner and Moz’s own Keyword Explorer start to struggle to tell the difference between “zero” and “low” when we get into this sort of territory, so you’re probably going to have to do something better than that. Some ideas worth considering:

Test for volume and interest with paid search

If you already have a variety of pages, find out which ones receive zero or nearly zero organic traffic and conversions

Test opening up deeper locations for a small number of areas (small enough that you’re confident the strain on indexation and spreading of equity won’t impact your site as a whole!)

See what your competitors are doing. They might not be getting it right, but it could be a useful source of ideas to validate

The second question is more complex. Adding thousands or even millions of extra pages to any website is a dangerous game. You should be concerned as to whether Google will allocate enough crawl budget, or whether you’ll damage the strength of existing pages.

Here are some ideas to consider:

Test opening up extra locations for half of areas. Monitor the performance of the unaffected half of the site vs. a counterfactual, as well as the affected half of the site vs. the unaffected half.

If the affected side underperforms, you’re spreading yourself too thin.

If the unaffected side underperforms but the affected side does not, work out whether the aggregate effect was positive or negative.

(How not to) Optimize pages for local search

Here’s what Serenata have done to optimize for local search in the example I used above:

This is sitting at the bottom of the category page and contains such stunners as “Our florists in West Wellow have the experience and the passion to create beautiful bouquets for any occasion.” I’m sure they would, if they existed.

Clearly this is keyword stuffing at its finest. In or out of local search, this kind of category/listing page SEO drivel feels like it shouldn’t work anymore, but in fact your mileage may vary, and again, if you already have this, you should test:

Removing it entirely

Turning down the keyword density

I’ve seen numerous examples in the last year of sites benefitting from improving or getting rid of this kind of useless content.

So what to do instead? Above, I said:

“The best litmus test for whether you should be pursuing this type of landing page strategy is whether you can actually think of a useful way to differentiate these pages for users.”

This means that you should have something genuinely useful that you can put on these pages. Some recommendations:

Proprietary data – e.g. what the most popular flowers are in this location.

Local differentiation – e.g. are some of the products delivered to this location sourced locally?

Genuine local expertise – could any employees or subcontractors in this area contribute?

Reviews for this location

Reassurance – e.g. if you think a user is looking for a local florist because of delivery concerns, say how long the flowers will be traveling for

Looking forward

As location targeting without physical premises is an area that still feels a little old-fashioned in its SEO trends, it’ll be interesting to see how it develops in the next few years. Personal assistants could have a particularly large impact here, for example. I’d love to hear your thoughts and predictions in the comments below.

we are a real estate agency and we work really hard in local SEO. I would like to make a question. How its possible that Real estate Agents (not agencys) without physical location appear in de local SEO search in the map? Google dont controls this fake locations?

95% of the time to appear in Maps you have to use an address and receive a flyer. I've heard on rare occasions you can setup accounts w/ only phone verification. The only time I 've been able to claim/setup an account by phone was if it already pre existed. So what these agents are doing is most likely using their home address or an address they can receive mail at, to claim and setup the google map account. When they are setting it up they hide the address/location. In the maps this will populate with only city, state. Like: Miami, FL. I don't think this is considered 100% spam if one agent has one Google listing. An agent is an individual marketing them self as an agent.Since the agent is providing a service out in the field Google allows hidden address. Anymore questions look at my site www.royaltyseo.com

Bookmarked. Literally yesterday I started making a website for wedding decorator in our city. They don't have a physical addres, so I have to improv. This article will help. Thanks.

So far I made an "about us" page with an address that goes like Country, Region, City, District. Added phone number and an email and submitted that for localization verification by Yandex (they do that), waiting for the results. If they will buy it and set a local region for the website without a physical address I'll move on to Google.

Local SEO is what I do on a day to day basis and I often find that we hit a brick wall, especially when (for example) a B & B in Hythe wants to rank for the exact same search terms in the surrounding areas when they don't physically have an address there.

I agree that using local advice and content for specific pages is a fantastic way of improving local rankings and I always look for fresh content depending on the area. I find that this method can drastically improve local rankings and to be honest, it keeps me interested in the work I'm doing.

I'm currently doing a lot of work for a client in Southampton with their reviews and I've seen a big boost for the areas we're targeting (mainly due to the reviews).

I do local SEO in a country where more or less the same happens. Crossing a street, we are in a new location, with a different zip code. Of course, clients deliver to all the surrounding areas.

Right now, I am working for a drugstore that has delivery service, and best of all, a night delivery service, the only one for 30 miles around it. It is a pro bono, and they are fantastic and extremely helpful too.

It's great that you covered this topic here Tom as I feel that there is a lot to be said about local SEO and businesses which target other locations where they have no physical presence.

I've found it to be quite a difficult landscape to navigate when so many websites are carrying out what is (IMO) simply the art of keyword-stuffing, yet they're still ranking very highly for doing so. Taking a look at the Serenata Flowers example again, just searching for instances of "West wellow" on that page you referenced brings 17 results (30 when searching the source code). Looking at the tail-end of the page it looks like clear keyword-stuffing, and looks like it's deceptive too (they refer to themselves many times as being a florist based in West wellow. The only relevant, local information which they are including are local-reviews on the right-sidebar, which is at least some unique content.

To me a page like this should only be used for PPC marketing as a landing page, enabling businesses to target areas which don't perhaps warrant their own permanent (and therefore organic) page on the website, and I'd also noindex that page. But when it's so clear that this tactic is working, why would Serenata Flowers (and the majority of other sites on the web, they're not the only ones doing this) change? It will only happen when Google starts to seriously target these sites, which is unlikely as it is still quite a grey area. At the moment this likely falls under the "Little or no Original Content" warning from Google's Webmaster Guidelines, or a "Doorway Page" but it's tricky to pin it down to a specific one.

I think this will change, gradually, even if Google don't start explicitly penalising it. This is because of:

Changing search behaviour - people might, for example, increasingly just search for "flowers" and leave Google to figure out the location and whether it's relevant

Google learning to understand the concept of a delivery area - this would be a welcome and much needed addition to how local search works, and would remove the need for a site like Serenata to have location pages at all

This is actually interesting, but is it only me or this website Serenata Flowers seems to have a lot of fake content to enrich pages? I mean look at the reviews for the flower Aztec sun. Overall Rating: 4.4, Total Reviews: 8074, is this serious? It made me laugh so hard.

Anyway, back to your topic, local SEO can be targeted if you have no physical premises until someone who does comes along. I can bet that if a West Willow florist comes along with a properly optimized website, he will rank nr.1 for that keyword.

But I still think that you should have some kind of local relation with those specific keyword. I mean, for example, you have an online product that is consumed anywhere (like a Ebook) is very deceptive to try to rank for local keyword.

Love this post, Tom. So often, "local seo" seems to be synonymous with local citations and other tactics for businesses with a physical local presence, but there are so many online-only companies that serve local needs. I've seen others in this comment thread remark that businesses with a physical location, but that doesn't currently seem to be the case for many search terms, such as "apartments in [CITY]" or "babysitter in [CITY]" even when there are already plenty of competitors. Do you think this will change as local search algorithms become more refined? Or do you think there will always be a place for digital-only businesses on local SERPs as long as their content is of enough quality?

I think for terms like "apartments in CITY" to not have digital only businesses in SERPs, Google would have to be essentially scraping listing sites and presenting them as its own widget - like it does with flights. This is possible, but I don't think it's likely in the near future.

Great piece. I run a site for a solar contractor who is a bit of both - we do in fact have four physical locations which we market, but then our actual product/service is installed on site at a customer's home.

As part of our strategy we develop a 'project gallery' where we have an indexable URL w/ photos and description (w/ some privacy safeguards) of client work across our geographic range, "E.g. Alfred, ME Solar Projects w/ photos and url /alfred-maine-solar-projects/"

As you might expect, there is not much competition in these 'long tail' geographic queries and we do well.

BUT these pages do not rank well in the 'solar near me' queries, when crap like national directories e.g. "Find me a solar installer" directory type junk (which drives up the cost for solar by acting as a 'middleman' and charging solar companies for leads who otherwise might convert on their own websites) - whereas the actual local 'brand' ranks - we are #10 in the listing, so there, but nowhere near the top.

How would you differentiate between something like Serenata Flowers where a service is delivered over the phone / internet / courier vs a service like plumbing where the service provider actually attends the local premise?

Is it still spam if someone like the plumber (who covers a wide area) targets local searches in all the areas he covers?

I'd argue that Serenata actually attend the premises to just the same extent - they're both businesses covering large catchments who "deliver" their service to a variety of locations within it.

I'd encourage the plumber to have a My Business listing for each location they have a contractor based in, although I realise in reality that service areas can be larger than customers anticipate - it's this kind of complexity that makes this such a grey area.

As a local business owner, I feel disadvantaged that I don't have a physical address. I'm a photographer who shoots on location, not in a studio. I'd love to use tools like Moz Local and build local citations, but I'd rather not publish my home address everywhere.

Well, friend, just because you don't need a studio to shoot your photos doesn't mean you can't get one. I mean, rent something cheap just to get your mails there, have a big board where it says how you can be contacted, and make sure you use verification from Google local listings and all these sort of things.

I can understand you don't want to waste money, but you are a Local business (because you only shoot photos in that area) and you deserve to be recognized like that from all aspects. I mean, just my opinion. Would be a shame to not take advantage of these kind of opportunities.

I am being devil's advocate here so first let me say what you advocate is laudable and correct but...

The site in question is still ranking of course without any physical presence as you outline and several other commenters have said. I see more and more what Google say and what Google does do not always match.

You see the same "carry on" with footer wide links (FWL) and sidebars. Despite the announcements that FWLs would be discounted an age ago there has been no impact. In my niche the two people who rank above me solely rank there due to footer wide links / linking domains.

The same applies for them with keyword stuffing. This isn't me moaning (well it is a bit) but I think in smaller niches Google just ignores this.

OF COURSE putting the effort in along with great pillar (ugh) content and working the other good stuff should in theory kick these guys asses but I would love to see a competition / example where it did.

Fantasticly brilliant post I have to say. I think that with technical SEO, big business SEO, and e-commerce, there is a missing link at times with the good ol fashioned local SEO clients that need the assistance of a great marketer. My biggest take away from this is when a person chooses to do a city specific landing page utilizing local advice or tips that will make the gateway page an actual tool for a user.

I really like your ideas of the types of flowers delivered in a specific area, or times. These are questions a user is going to be looking for and if you can capture that then more searches will happen but you will also have a evergeen piece of content due to the value it brings for the person looking at it.

Great tips on how to optimize a website when you do not have a physical presence as well what tactics to avoid. I have noticed that another way to optimize for local queries in such situations is to add the address & the phone number from where you operate on the footer at the bottom of every page. This specially holds good for freelancers who operate from home ( and cannot display the street level address for privacy reasons) as well as others who operate online and have no physical office

I think that's good advice where it applies - in the case of a business like Seranata, however, they have no local phone number or address. In the case of a freelancer, I'd encourage them to have an office space that they can use for a My Business listing if they think that local queries are a likely source of revenue, as their business is genuinely local.

I think what is missing here is using a silo approach to Local SEO. What seems to be working for me is setting up a layer of pages. The initial page is simply a page listing out the various locations (sub pages) I am trying to rank for. It includes some information about the company and main keywords I am trying to target for.

Each of these sub pages goes into detail about the location with links to the other pages and also local points of interest within those locations. The pages start looking like Wikipedia and is probably the reason they rank well.

You can take this a step further by creating sub pages off of each specific location pages. That way when Google hits the initial page, it will index all the other pages and realize there is a lot there. My guess is rightly or wrongly Google ranks these pages higher simply because of all the interlinking and local signals.

Example

Location Page links to the following pages.

Fairfax County

Arlington County

Alexandria

Falls Church

For me I think this works because the structure is more authoritative in Google's eyes.

The hard part about this approach is you are targeting a specific keyword, so if you want to target another specific keyword that isn't related to the first keyword, you will have to a separate structure.

Solid piece. That was one of the challenges for the UK startup I worked for. How local do we go with all our pages for SEO? In the end we focused on our major cities outside of London and looked at how to make each page unique to the market. We didn't get a local phone number though as we found that didn't help the business to grow in the long run.

Wow, very topical. In the last 7 days I've registered over 50 'near me' domains. It seems Google is really pushing keyword + nearme in the SERPS. All you have to do is enter any semi-major keyword (especially on a mobile device) and your first recommended search will almost always be the keyword + nearme. Try it!

Good post and examples, Tom. Local SEO was difficult before and is becoming a beast. Google changes the "rules" so frequently it's difficult to keep up with best practices. That said, spam still works. I dont recommend it, nor do I participate in it (#stopcraponthemap) but I see it working all the time. Keyword stuffing, doorway pages, spam map listings, etc and the list goes on. You have to believe at some point G will crack down on these tactics. Until then, keep up the good fight!

This post bursts a lot of myths related to local optimization. I have applied similar strategies for one of gift and delivery websites, and it worked great. But, still, the caveat lies that sometimes, Google reacts differently to different strategies. Like, below the fold content can sometimes be beneficial even if it is used to just increase the keyword rich content without much uniqueness or differentiation. So, it is in grey area. As rightly advised, it needs to be tested to see the litmus result. Addition/removal of content, let the ranks of the website go on either side on the search results. So, it all boils down to doing things as mentioned in the post and tracking the impact regularly.

I appreciate you tackling a relatively controversial subject around how to position landing pages for local SEO. I think the fundamental question, SEOs need to ask is what are my customers (or client's customers) willing to tolerate in terms misrepresentation as a tradeoff for a local feel. In some industries, it's a harder question to answer than in others. You might put up with it for a purchase that you make once every few months like flowers, but you wouldn't with something like groceries that you purchase every week. I think if you're going to serve up dynamic content based on location, you had better understand what your customers will tolerate.

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I think the idea of the post is directed around the same keywords searched but for different areas and the best ways to appear for those search terms. I know what you mean though. I've searched the same keywords an hour later and received no map listings when Google displayed them on the first search.